2012: Obama's re-elect kicks off with testimonials from the grassroots. [BarackObama.com]

FOIL: Wikiaccountability.org collects FOIL requests scrutinizing Obama. [Noam Cohen]

Federal Budget: Schumer doubts there'll be a shutdown. [Thomas DeFrank]

Redistricting: Tie-breaking professor endorses "Democratic-drawn map." Christie a loser. [Lisa Fleisher]

Redistricting: Christie got very involved. [Richard Perez-Pena]

Comparing Cuomo: He's like "Happy Warrior" Alfred E Smith, but Cuomo "isn't known to be as warm and fuzzy." [Rick Karlin]

Questioning Cuomo: Why did't Cuomo negotiate with schools the way he negotiated with healthcare "stakeholders" during Medicaid redesign? [Fred LeBrun]

Questioning Cuomo: Will education cuts and property tax hikes be blamed on Cuomo, or local school districts? [Casey Seiler]

Property Tax Cap: Cuomo insiders say Skelos may hold it up. [Fred Dicker]

Albany Ethics: It's next up on Cuomo's agenda. [WNYT]

Albany Ethics: Silver says he has a deal with Cuomo. [Ken Lovett]

Albany Ethics: "Cleaning Albany's ethical stable is as necessary a task as maintaining a balanced budget" say the editors. [New York Post]

Message Control: State's top geologist is barred from talking to reporters since making comments about gas drilling. [Times Union]

Labor: Central Labor Council holds first political directors meeting in six months; major rally set for Saturday. [Celeste Katz]

Voting: Walter Cronkite and Frank McCourt among dead celebrities listed as eligible voters. [Aaron Short]

Education Deals: Dean Skelos gets TAP funding approved, Agudath officials agree to support GOP for Kruger's seat. [Chris Bragg]

Education Money: "The pain is just beginning." [Jay Jochnowitz]

Education Money: Downward pressure to make budget cuts. [Tiffany Lankes]

Education Staff: Bloomberg sends new mailers, attacking "Last In First Out." [Heather Haddon]

Education Staff: "No teachers in the classroom should be cut, period," says Gale Brewer. [Emily Neil]

Education Staff: As enrollment dropped, more supervisors and teachers were hired. [Brendan Scott]

Campaign Money: Oddo says raise bar for matching funds. Paper describes "candidates [who] got a total of $900,000 in matching funds but only got an average of 6 percent of the primary vote." [Tom Wrobleski]

Campaign Money: Critic complains Oddo's bill will hurt minority challengers. [Sally Goldenberg]

Housing: De Blasio wants "worst landlords" info on Craigslist; potential 2013 rival has long record on the issue. [David Chen]

Crime: 24 percent spike in rapes in NYC compared to 2010. [Bob Kappstatter]

Crime: 32 percent spike in rapes in NYC compared to 2009. [Bob Kappstatter]

Mr. Cook, formerly of Gawker and now of Yahoo!, has found information about a phone call between Mr. Cronkite and student activists in which he gave them advice about organizing and offered CBS money to rent a helicopter. The helicopter would bring Maine Senator Edmund Muskie to the site of a protest that the students were planning at the launch of Apollo 12 at Cape Canaveral (then Cape Kennedy). President Nixon would also be present at the launch.

CBS News would stay to cover 36 hours of the protest and provide an "open mike," according to a report from an FBI informant involved with the student group. The conversation is at least fourth-hand by the time it gets to Mr. Cook.

Mr. Cook checked the story with Mr. Cronkite's son Chip.

Chip Cronkite, Walter Cronkite's son, told Yahoo! News it's highly unlikely that his father would ever have made such an offer. "It doesn't have the ring of a reliable story to me," he said. "Particularly at a time when FBI informants often told the FBI what they wanted to hear. I think it would be outside of what we know about Walter Cronkite and CBS News' practices."

It is unclear if Senator Muskie utlimately appeared at the protest.

Previously Times Union Ducks a 'Dilemma' Over John Cook's FOIL Request>

A little over a week ago, New York reported that Cronkite’s three-bedroom, five-bathroom apartment  was in contract and due to close any day. Well, the day has come. According to city records, the 25^th-floor tower apartment sold for $2.5 million to Citi Private Bank managing director Georgia S. Mouzakis Tavlarios—and you thought Greeks were in trouble.

The apartment was appropriately listed by Fox Residential’s Joanna Simon, the glimmering, glamorous broker by day, mezzo-soprano by night. (Well, not exactly: Ms. Simon took up real estate after retiring from the stage, but she was a formidable songstress in her day, much like her sister, Carly.) Ms. Simon, who also resides in the storied glass towers, was Cronkite’s companion in his later years, after the passing of their respective spouses.

Ms. Simon politely declined to comment for this article but described the apartment to The Observer late last year, when it first came on the market: “He has leather chairs and big desks, and a lot of big couches and things like that. It looked like Walter.” She suggested that the buyer may want to consider kitchen and bathroom renovations—"It has an early American look, and that’s not very fashionable these days." She also proposed the apartment be returned to a four-bedroom unit from its current configuration as a two-bedroom with a double-size master bedroom suite (with his and her baths, naturally), the second bedroom used by Cronkite as a library and the third bedroom serving as a maid’s room.

The corner apartment with south and west facing views of the East River through floor-to-ceiling windows, received a landslide of press when it went on the market for $2.995 million in December. That likely contributed to its swift sale—it entered contract in January, after being on the market only four days. Ms. Simon told New York that the buyers, who “felt a reverence for his spirit and reputation” planned to keep Cronkite’s office intact, just the way it was.

And that’s the way it is.

cmalle@observer.com

This was not the first incident for Balloon Dad.

One of the smoking gun e-mails in the Bear Stearns case is no longer smoking.

Art make students smart, or at least more likely to graduate.

32 new exo-planets are discovered; SuperEarths rise 30 percent.

Columbia suspends its environmental reporting program.

An NYU grad student is getting food stamps; this worries fellow NYU students.

More Glamour staffers are out of work.

Frankfurt Book Fairgoers are not psyched about Google Books.

Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis offends some Christians.

Mayor Bloomberg isn't taking sides on the other side of the river.

Senator Schumer starts a fight over overdraft fees.

Mike Scioscia keeps hoping for a heartbeat.

Profit drops 53 percent, making Gannett cheerful.

Invoking Detroit: indefensible.

After Walter Cronkite died this July at age 92, it was sad to think that brokers would be clamoring for an apartment that had belonged to someone with such cosmic grace and gravitas. But there won’t be a clamor. Joanna Simon, a vice president at the boutique brokerage Fox Residential, and Cronkite’s companion during the last four years, will be listing his UN Plaza co-op within the month for $2,995,000.

>>READ MAX ABELSON'S SECRETS OF THE CRONKITE TOWNHOUSE SALE

Ms. Simon, 68, became a broker in the 1990s. “Liz Smith, who was a friend,” she said, “put something in her column about the fact that Joanna Simon, former opera singer and TV star—because, you know, I worked for PBS—has started a new career, and she’s hot.” (She had been an arts correspondent and a mezzo-soprano, though it was sister Carly who wrote “You’re So Vain”; their father, Richard, co-founded Simon & Schuster.)

The tennis player Ham Richardson, and his wife, Midge, a past editor of Seventeen, read the announcement. “They called me, and said, ‘We have this fabulous apartment we would like to sell.’” It was at 860/870 UN Plaza, the mid-1960s towers where Truman Capote once lived and where Ms. Simon happened to have a place, too.

The Cronkites were looking for a new apartment with Ms. Simon’s boss, Barbara Fox, but weren’t interested in moving near the United Nations. “I said, ‘Let’s hire a very fancy car, and put blinders on,’” Ms. Simon said. The couple came, but a fog made it hard to appreciate the massive East River views. “They could not see out the apartment, but they loved the layout. And they bought it.”

After a small fight over wall sconces, she said, the deal closed. “Betsy—Mrs. Cronkite—and I became good friends; and Walter and my husband, Gerald Walker, who had been an editor for The New York Times, had a lot in common.”
By the end of 2005, after the deaths of their spouses, the broker and the anchor were keeping company, as he once put it.

Ms. Simon, who has kept her original co-op in the building, said that a buyer may want to update the kitchen and bathrooms in Cronkite’s apartment, or change it back from a two-bedroom to a four-bedroom. “It has an early American look, and that’s not very fashionable these days. When he saw my apartment, he said, ‘I would love to live here, but it’s so feminine. We’d have to bring in a lot of masculine things.’ He has leather chairs and big desks, and a lot of big couches and things like that. It looked like Walter.”

mabelson@observer.com

Mr. Clinton leaned forward, basking in the bittersweet memory. Cronkite, Mr. Clinton explained, proceeded to invite him and Hillary and Chelsea for a day of sailing out on the open seas. "He said, 'Somebody might take a picture of it, but so what?'" Mr. Clinton recalled. "I'll never forget that."

He paused. "At the time, I could have done with a picture with Walter Cronkite."

The crowd erupted in laughter at the thought of the most trusted man in America lending some contact credibility to the hounded president. Sometimes in life we could all use a little bit of borrowed trust. Trust by association.

It was the morning of Wednesday, September 9, and hundreds of politicians, journalists, and national power brokers had packed into the opulent hall at Lincoln Center for one last memorial service celebrating the life of the late Walter Cronkite. The room was full of TV news stars and the bosses who attend to them: Barbara Walters,  Sean McManus, Morley Safer, Les Moonves, Tom Brokaw, Sir Howard Stringer, Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer, Charlie Rose, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, David Westin, Brian Williams, Charles Gibson, Steve Capus, Jon Klein, Jeff Fager and on and on.

Roughly six weeks earlier, a subset of the same crowd had gathered at St. Bartholomew's Church, on Park Avenue between 50th and 51st streets, for an Episcopal service, laying Cronkite to rest. But if there ever any doubt about who throws a more entertaining memorial service, TV producers or church professionals, Wednesday's mesmerizing event quelled it.

Over the course of several hours, the crowd was treated to a thrill ride of soulful music and rollicking remembrances that were at once sad, funny, complex, uplifting, and loving. By the end, even strangers would leave the room feeling they knew Walter Cronkite the journalist and Walter Cronkite the man.

Along the way, astronaut Buzz Aldrin explained what it was like to accidentally run into Cronkite on a small Greek island. Katie Couric told stories about Cronkite firing his canon at his house on Martha's Vineyard. Jimmy Buffett explained what it was like to solicit sartorial advice from Cronkite on behalf of Ed Bradley. Tom Brokaw elaborated on Cronkite's love for New York City, and his penchant for eating breakfast at the Copacabana.

President Barack Obama, just hours before his health care speech to the nation, materialized onstage and delivered a sermon about what Cronkite could teach us about the way forward for the troubled news business. Mickey Hart, of the Grateful Dead, played drums. Wynton Marsalis led a marching band through the audience.

Bob Schieffer told an amazing yarn, involving Dick Cheney, President Gerald Ford, Barbara Walters, Cronkite, and a flu shot. By the end, Mr. Schieffer had the whole room in stitches.

Six weeks earlier, Andy Rooney, whose friendship with Cronkite dates back to World War II, had been overwhelmed with emotion when trying to speak publicly about Cronkite. This time, producers delivered Mr. Rooney's thoughts in a pre-taped video package. Therein, Mr. Rooney got great mileage with a riff about Cronkite's post-retirement career, accepting award after award after award after award. He wore out three tuxedos, said Mr. Rooney, just picking up the damn things. A classic photo montage showed Cronkite shaking hands and holding various funny-looking ceremonial plaques, stuffed birds, and trophies.

Several of the day's speakers said that Cronkite would have loved the ceremony. The sentiment rang true.

Amid all the amazing yarns about Walter at the anchor's desk, Walter on his sailboat, Walter during World War II, Walter at the bar enjoying a cocktail, came the occasional moment of genuine melancholy. The sudden sadness of heartfelt loss.

At one point, Nick Clooney—friend of Walter, father of famous actor George Clooney—told about the last time he had a dinner in public with Cronkite. This was towards the end. Cronkite was in poor health. Mr. Clooney wasn't sure his pal would make it. But, sure enough, the anchorman eventually shuffled in. It was an early dinner. The restaurant was empty. But as they ate and drank and told stories, the room gradually filled up. At the end of dinner, Cronkite stood up. And for the first time, the other patrons in the room realized with whom they were eating dinner.

Slowly, Cronkite made his way to the door. Mr. Clooney followed. As Cronkite passed his way through the dining hall, one by one, every man, woman and child, without saying a word, rose to their feet in silent salute. "Because that's what you do," said Mr. Clooney, softly, "when a gentleman is leaving the room."

It was 2:20 p.m. on the afternoon of Thursday, July 23, and Mr. Rooney, TV news's most celebrated curmudgeon, was standing with a microphone at the front of St. Bartholomew's Church, on Park Avenue between 50th and 51st streets.

The Episcopal church was packed with friends and family members who had gathered for the funeral of Walter Cronkite, who had died six days earlier.

Mr. Rooney launched into a war story. He said he first met Cronkite in London, during the Second World War, where both men were reporters. Back then, Mr. Rooney said, the U.S. military used to inform newsmen when they were about to conduct an air raid. These days, he said, you're lucky if they tell you after they've made an air raid.

That got a few chuckles from the many dozen TV news reporters, anchors, producers and executives, who were sitting in the first few rows of pews.

Half an hour earlier, before the start of the service, Tom Brokaw and Maureen Orth had walked together down the center aisle of the church, past Aaron Brown to their right, and Connie Chung to their left. Actor Jerry Stiller walked a few feet behind them, followed by longtime journalist Carl Bernstein.

They passed by a cluster of ABC News stars, including Barbara Walters, Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer and David Westin.

They made their way to the front of the church, and found seats. Nearby was the CBS clique: The Early Show's Zev Shalev sat alongside Harry Smith and Jeff Greenfield, not far from Bill Plante, Russ Mitchell and Dave Price,

Mr. Brokaw shook hands with Matt Lauer, who was sitting with fellow NBC News staffers, including Brian Williams, Ann Curry and Steve Capus.

CNN's John Roberts, who left CBS when he didn't get the job of CBS Evening News anchor, sat by himself. A few rows back was Dan Rather, who inherited that same job from Cronkite, and eventually passed it on to Katie Couric, who sat up front, next to Leslie Moonves.

Now they all looked up at Mr. Rooney, who furrowed his bushy white eyebrows and said that Cronkite's passing had caused him great pain. "Please excuse me, thank you," said Mr. Rooney. And with that, he shuffled away from the microphone, a mere two minutes into his speech.

Sandy Socolow, Cronkite's longtime executive producer and friend, took center stage. He told a series of affectionate anecdotes, highlighting Cronkite's imperfections.

Mr. Socolow recounted the time Cronkite lost his cool on the air at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 and later regretted it. He observed that Cronkite played the clarinet badly and, for some reason, could never pronounce the work "February" correctly. "We would rehearse it for the last few weeks of January," said Mr. Socolow.

He then explained the concept of "magic time," a system of calculations and re-calibrations producers had to employ over the years in order to compensate for Cronkite's irregular sense of timing while reading the news. And finally, he regaled the audience with a story about the time Cronkite decided he no longer needed a script and henceforth, would ad-lib the evening news. "Walter insisted that when it came time to roll the film, he would brush his nose," said Mr. Socolow.

The experiment, Mr. Socolow said, lasted all of two days. Everyone laughed.

Mike Ashford, one of Cronkite's sailing buddies, told stories about his friend's love of the sea, hot popcorn, and cold beer.

Chip Cronkite said he loved  to watch his father work and marveled at his speed—his ability to swing around in his chair during a commercial break and rewrite a story. He said his father was happy and that he was happy for his father. He was glad the old man got his life's story down on paper, penning an autobiography before losing his mental steam. "I'm sorry I insulted him," said Chip, "by saying I was surprised by how funny it was."

At one point, Mr. Socolow recalled that one day, toward the end of his life, Mr. Cronkite received a visit from the patron saint of beaches, sailing and cocktails. Jimmy Buffett, he explained, had landed his waterplane on the East River, not far from Cronkite's apartment. Mr. Buffett then proceeded to serenade the newsman turned sailor with a jamming ukulele.

On Thursday afternoon, there was lots of music, but no ukuleles. Seafaring themes, however, were in abundance. From Hymn 608 ("Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee/ For those in peril on the sea!") to the hymn Finlandia ("My country's skies are bluer than the ocean") to a recitation of a John Masefield poem ("I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life/ To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife.")

When Bill Harbach finished reading the latter poem, he said a final goodbye to his old friend: "Good sailing, Walter."

“He took the news seriously,” said Dan Rather. “But he didn’t take himself all that seriously, which is rare for television, let’s face it.”

It was the afternoon of Monday, July 21, and Mr. Rather was speaking about the late Walter Cronkite, who died four days earlier at the age of 92.

On camera, Cronkite was famously stoic, the perfect ideal of a composed newsman, delivering news of national victories and tragedies without rage or anger or sadness or humor. But away from the TV cameras, Cronkite was something else. He was a bit of a cut-up.

In recent days, stories of Cronkite’s idiosyncratic brand of personal levity could be found here and there amid the broader torrent of news, chronicling the newsman’s life and legacy. The New York Times reported that Cronkite liked to exchange off-color jokes with Ronald Reagan and “whimsically competed with his friend Johnny Carson to see who could take the most vacation time without getting fired.”

Throughout his adult life, Cronkite revered General Dwight Eisenhower. And like his idol, Cronkite enjoyed playing the occasional practical joke.

Don Hewitt, the creator of 60 Minutes, recently recounted one to the New York Post. “We were in Cape Canaveral,” said Mr. Hewitt, “and a new reporter was arriving and Walter said to him, ‘If you just keep looking at that rocket there on that green patch at the end of the runway there, you’ll see it blast off. Just don’t take your eyes off it.’ The guy sat there for six hours waiting for it to go off. It was a lighthouse.”

Being the Most Trusted Man in America did have its perks!

Mr. Rather recalled to the Transom a moment years ago, when Cronkite was busy at work in the CBS newsroom, which was housed in an old dairy barn on 57th Street between 10th and 11th avenues. “Everyone knew that the place was mightily infested with rats and mice,” Mr. Rather said. “The women were a little nervous about this. I don’t mean that to be gender-specific, but it’s true.”

Various news assistants were scurrying here and there, running copy around the newsroom on deadline. Cronkite waited for the right moment, and then … bazoom! He unleashed a little plastic mouse, which he had smuggled into the hotbed of rodent paranoia. Much screaming ensued.

“He immediately apologized for it, saying something along the lines that he was just trying to lighten things up around there,” said Mr. Rather. “This was very Walter-esque.”

The parties that Cronkite and his late wife, Betsy, regularly threw at their house on the Upper East Side were also good opportunities for the newsman to show off his lighter side. “He would sit at his player piano and sing songs, with some sort of crazy hat on,” said Mr. Rather. “He was an exceptionally good dancer. And for no explainable or obvious reason, he would also break into a kind of wacky dance, a Greek or Turkish-looking dance, where his legs would fly out in one direction and his arms in the other. It was ridiculous but very sweet.

“He could take a belt of scotch with the best of them,” Mr. Rather continued. “He could smoke a cigar with the best of them. He could admire a well-turned ankle on a bombshell with the best of them—as you would expect a world-traveled correspondent. He loved to tell jokes. And he loved to hear jokes. Walter did have a terrific sense of humor.”

Verne Gay of Newsday has confirmed the report.

"Cronkite's been ill for a while, but he has definitely taken a turn for the worse," writes Mr. Gay. "Now, he is 92 years old, and it's worth nothing that his father lived nearly to 100 and his mother, famously, well past 100."

"How bad is it?" he wrote. "Very bad."

“With all honesty, I don’t think we can expect it to be much greater than it has been in past years,” said the newsman, who is now 91. “I don’t see any great movement, unfortunately.”

But outside of politics, he said, he has noticed “a great improvement—a great national interest—in the proper role of religion. The awareness, if you please, of the church, anybody’s church; they’re all important.”

Sitting next to Mr. Cronkite, who retained something of a prep-school aesthetic in his blue blazer, red tie and dark slacks, was C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, who was also feeling a little polemical.

“Appreciation for religion is one thing—fine, good—but to put one’s vote on the basis of an individual’s faith or religion is not only against Article Six in the Constitution, it doesn’t really take seriously what is involved in the presidency of the United States,” Mr. Gaddy said. “So for the integrity of religion and the vitality of democracy, we think religion ought to act like religion, and government ought to act like government.”

“That’s why so many have fault with [Mr. Gaddy] in this appreciation of the actual role of the church in its functioning with our living style that we all can accept,” Mr. Cronkite chimed in.

Erica Jong, the author and onetime Observer scribe, was also a guest at last night’s gala, where Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn were being honored.

“If you look at the books that have come out, all the down-with-God books that have been bestsellers in the last couple of years, you can see that people are starting to be aware that the blurring of church-and-state is not good for our democracy,” Ms. Jong said before taking a sip of her peach-colored Bellini. “And I don’t know if we’re at a tipping point yet,” she continued, “but I hope so. I think people are pretty damn sick of what’s going on and I hope that it’s not just on the coasts.”